Lead Product Designer

Your Role

As a Lead Product Designer at Pomelo, you'll be at the heart of creating meaningful and delightful experiences that bring together user needs and business goals. Your mission is to design clear, user-friendly, and engaging product experiences that help our customers and build trust over time. You’ll have the opportunity to work across the entire customer journey, from the moment potential customers first hear about Pomelo to supporting our returning customers with their money transfer needs. Your designs will be driven by customer insights and data, whether from qualitative research or experiment results.

In this individual contributor role, you’ll report directly to our VP of Product and collaborate closely with our Senior Product Designer. As the second product designer to join our team, you’ll play an important role in shaping Pomelo’s design culture and processes.

While your main focus will be on product design, we encourage you to be an advocate for all aspects of design at Pomelo, including marketing and brand-related projects. You’ll partner with various teams across the company, becoming a trusted collaborator with colleagues in product management, engineering, growth, marketing, and analytics.

Primary Responsibilities

• Holistic Design Thinking: Consider complex systems, empathize with users, and understand business goals to create insightful, effective, and delightful consumer experiences.
• Design & Validation: Create and validate designs through sketches, prototypes, and testing. Determine the information architecture and flow for product features, create high-fidelity visuals, and collaborate with colleagues to ensure a high-quality implementation and user experience.
• Collaborative Work: Thrive in a fast-paced, collaborative environment, working with product managers, engineers, growth marketers, and analysts to prioritize and build impactful experiences.
• Design System Development: Help build and maintain our design system, advocating for scalable design solutions that move seamlessly from discovery to delivery. Use the right tools at the right moments to maximize impact.
• Culture & Process Building: Contribute to the growth and development of our design culture, processes, and use of tools.
• Design Advocacy: Be a passionate champion for design, proactively identifying opportunities, forming strong opinions, and advocating to bring them to life.

What We’re Looking For

• Experience: A minimum of 6 years in a professional product design role as an individual contributor.
• Portfolio: An outstanding portfolio that showcases your expertise in user experience, interaction, and visual/user interface design for consumer products.
• Fintech Design Experience: Experience in designing for user-facing fintech products.
• Project Leadership: Proven experience in taking design projects from discovery and iteration through to delivery, shipping high-quality experiences.
• Process Flexibility: An understanding of the end-to-end design process, with the ability to adapt and modify the process based on project and team needs.
• Data-Driven Design: Experience in driving research and using qualitative and quantitative data to inform design decisions.
• Collaboration: Strong collaboration skills, able to work effectively with designers, product managers, engineers, and other cross-functional team members.
• Adaptability: Resourceful, adaptable, and comfortable navigating the challenges of a dynamic early-stage startup environment.
• Decision-Making: Ability to balance trade-offs and make thoughtful decisions on what can be done now vs. later, ensuring a meaningful balance between quality and speed.
• Communication: Excellent communication skills, with the ability to explain, educate, and persuade. You should be comfortable presenting, leading meetings, and writing clearly to drive understanding.
• Leadership & Teamwork: Strong leadership abilities and a team-oriented mindset.
• Systems Thinking: A systems thinker who can connect different aspects of the customer experience to create a cohesive product journey.
• Craftsmanship: Strong skills in visual, interaction, written, and systems design.
• Design Judgment: Excellent design judgment and taste.
• Education/Experience: A B.A/B.S. in Graphic Design, Human-Computer Interaction, Computer Science, or a related field/equivalent experience.

Ideal Qualifications

• Fintech Experience: Previous experience with money transfer, consumer credit, or consumer fintech products.
• Startup Experience: Experience working in an early-stage startup.